For more than 30 years its walls rang with the sound of excited children
meeting authors or asking assistants whether the latest in their favourite
series had arrived.

But now The Lion and Unicorn lies empty, stripped of its shelves and of the thousands of books which used to fill them.

A few weeks ago this much loved children’s bookshop in Richmond, south west London, was forced to close for good, driven to the wall by the combined effect of rent rises and cut-price book sales by online retailers such as Amazon.

It is just one of more than 500 independent book shops put out of business in the last eight years by economic forces and shopping habits beyond their control.

For Jenny Morris, who opened The Lion and Unicorn in 1977 as her first business venture, locking the doors to the once thriving shop for the last time was one of the saddest days of her life.

“It’s been a very difficult decision to make after so many years,” she said. “Part of me just didn’t want to leave the building, it just wanted to carry on. But in the end I had to make the change. I didn’t have a realistic alternative.”

Through her doors had passed dozens of the country’s most famous children’s authors, including Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson, Shirley Hughes, the current Children’s Laureate Malorie Blackman and Anthony Horowitz, along with generations of their readers.

But for all the joy it brought her and her customers Mrs Morris, 70, felt there was no point carrying on any longer. The numbers simply did not stack up.

Five years ago her landlord increased her rent from £26,000 a year to £38,500. This year she faced a further increase on the back of a five-year rent review and in all likelihood would have had to pay at least £50,000 a year.

On top of that she had to pay business rates to her local council of £17,000 a year, as well as running costs including lighting, heating and stock control systems, and the salaries of two full-time members of staff and part-time assistants.

Recent years have seen both footfall and sales slide, as more and more customers turned to outlets such as Amazon. The result was that her turnover began to fall closer to the break-even mark, threatening to wipe out the earnings she had been making.

Mrs Morris said: “I didn’t want to be living the next five years closer and closer to the margins, simply struggling to keep my head above water. In the end I just couldn’t see how I could keep running the shop in the way I wanted to.”

She is clear where the blame lies for her predicament. As well as relentless rent rises, and the consumer squeeze which followed the banking crisis, there was Amazon.

The phenomenon of formerly loyal customers turning to the giant online retailer, which is able to offer large discounts and speedy delivery due to its economies of scale, became more and more noticeable.

It even got to the stage, says Mrs Morris, where parents would not only come in and ask her staff advice on particular books and authors but also take a photograph of book covers on their mobile phones, to make sure they had the right title, before disappearing to place their orders online.

“We knew what was happening,” she said. “But what could we do? We couldn’t start charging for our staff’s advice. Imagine how many loyal customers that would have alienated. And as a small bookseller we certainly could not compete on price.”

The impact of e-readers such as Kindle also began to make itself felt, with fewer teenagers coming into the store and fewer parents buying books on their behalf, despite the teen and young adult being one of the biggest growing areas in fiction. Many simply preferred to consume their books on screen.

The Booksellers Association says the plight of The Lion and Unicorn, which in 2000 became the first children’s bookshop to win Independent Bookseller of the Year, is far from unique.

Industry figures show that more than 70 independent book shops closed last year, with the total number falling from 1,535 in 2005 to 1,028.

Mrs Morris has enlisted the support of Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative MP for Richmond Park and North Kingston, to lobby the Government over the issue of high street rents and news of her shop’s closure has prompted a wave of support from authors and fellow booksellers.

The demise of Mrs Morris’s shop will deprive future generations of Richmond children of that special quality which independent bookshops bring to the high street – the intimacy, the attentiveness of staff, the readings and author visits which create a community of readers.

From the day it opened 36 years ago with a personal appearance by Roald Dahl — “the children flocked around him. It was such a wonderful way to start,” Mrs Morris said — The Lion and Unicorn has organised dozens of author appearances, as well as taking writers into local schools and organising special sessions for teachers and their classes. “It was such great fun. Seeing the reaction of the children to meeting the people who had written their favourite books was just wonderful and I’ll really miss that.”

Mrs Morris appreciates the pull of online retailers for shoppers, especially during straitened times, but she points out that the character of British towns and cities is being irrevocably threatened by their onward march. “My only message to anyone who values books and values the book trade would be that they really do need to think before they click, because there are so many good reasons to keep booksellers alive.”